Marsilio Ficino
Marsilio Ficino
Marsilio Ficinowas an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was also an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with every major academic thinker and writer of his day and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin. His Florentine Academy, an attempt to revive Plato's Academy, had enormous influence on the direction and tenor of the Italian Renaissance and the development of European...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth19 October 1433
CountryItaly
Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning.
A sturdy lad . . . who teams it, farms it . . . and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.
No man can claim to usurp more than a few cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room. . . .
Who can wonder at the attractiveness... of the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator?
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts And power to him who power exerts; Hast not thy share? On winged feet, Lo! it rushes thee to meet; . . .
. . . if [writing] lift you from your feet with the great voice of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men; . . .
There is a moment in the history of every nation, when . . . the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant . . . with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar and stellar creation.
Law it is . . . which hears without ears, sees without eyes, moves without feet and seizes without hands.
What is odious but . . . people . . . who toast their feet on the register. . . .
[Nature said] The sea shall disjoin the people [of England] from others, and knit them to a fierce nationality. It shall give them markets on every side. Long time I will keep them on their feet, by poverty, border-wars . . . seafaring . . .
You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not.
Mortal men ask God for good things every day, but they never pray that they may make good use of them.
The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance.
Poetry being an attempt to express, not the common sense, - as the avoirdupois of the hero, or his structure in feet and inches, - but the beauty and soul in his aspect . . . runs into fable, personifies every fact. . . .